The militarization of American foreign policy has evolved over the past thirty years. Ironically, this took place in the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which should have led to reassessing U.S. national security policy and defense spending. Democratic presidents have played a major role in this militarization because they are unwilling to challenge the Pentagon and the defense industry.

Bill Clinton was initially responsible for the militarization.  He abolished the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and began the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.  Barack Obama believed that war in Afghanistan was a “good war,” and reappointed Robert Gates as secretary of defense to appease the uniformed military.  President Joe Biden even appointed a retired four-star general to the position of secretary of defense, and has given diplomacy a back seat in the twin struggles with Russia and China.  The postwar presidents understood the need to divide Moscow and Beijing, but Biden has taken actions that have inspired Russia and China to grow closer.

But it all started with Clinton, whose relations with the Pentagon were tenuous from the outset.  Clinton came into office with a reputation for manipulating the draft laws in 1969 to avoid service in Vietnam.  Clinton, moreover, alienated the military shortly after his inauguration when he suggested that he would allow homosexuals to serve openly in the military.  Of course, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and William Cohen avoided Vietnam, but Republicans typically get a pass from the Pentagon and the press when avoiding service.  Former senator John Kerry was a Vietnam War hero, but his ultimate criticism of the war was highlighted by the mainstream media and his Republican opposition.

Clinton bowed to military pressure time and time again on numerous national security issues.  His capitulations weakened or abandoned agreements dealing with the International Criminal Court; a ban on landmines; the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty; and the Chemical Warfare Convention.  Clinton bowed to the Democratic Party’s right wing in naming James Woolsey as director of the Central Intelligence Agency.  When Woolsey, a Cold Warrior, wore out his welcome on the Hill, he was forced to resign. Clinton then named an Air Force general to succeed Woolsey; the general was forced to withdraw his nomination, but this earned no mention in Clinton’s autobiography.  Similarly, Clinton’s book makes no mention of his efforts to name Admiral Bobby Inman, another Cold Warrior, as secretary of defense.  Clinton’s CIA directors, John Deutch and George Tenet, contributed to the decline of the CIA.

The Pentagon had so little respect for Clinton that, in 1994, it did not respond to the efforts of the White House to create military options for stopping the genocide in Rwanda or for countering al Qaeda in Afghanistan.  Conversely, Clinton ordered the bombing of a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan in 1998 in the wake of the bombings of the U.S. embassies on the Horn of Africa.  The White House argued the plant was producing lethal chemicals; no, it was producing aspirin for all of Africa and this was known to the intelligence community.  Clinton’s White House and the Pentagon ignored the warnings of the Department of State and the CIA to avoid using Yemen as a refueling stop for U.S. warships because of the threat of terrorism.  As a result, the U.S.S. Cole was targeted in 2000 with a loss of 17 U.S. sailors.

We are still dealing with the results of Clinton’s ill-informed decision making, particularly with regard to the current crisis with Russia over Ukraine.  Clinton’s decision to expand NATO virtually ensured that there would be little progress in developing a strategic approach toward Russia.  The liberated states of East Europe, in the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, wanted to be anchored to the West, but the proper vehicle for such an arrangement was the European Union, not NATO.  Indeed, the greatest strategic failure of the Clinton administration was its marginalization of Russia rather than anchoring Russia to the West, as suggested by the late George Kennan in his strategy of containment.

The expansion of NATO marked a betrayal of President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State James A. Baker III’s commitment in 1990 to not “leapfrog” East Germany if the Soviets removed their 380,000 troops from the East.  The continuing flirtation of membership for both Ukraine and Georgia, which started in 2008, has caused Russia anxieties over the changing European balance.  Expanding NATO was a gratuitous provocation, which belies U.S. accusations from high-level officials that the crisis over Ukraine is a “manufactured” one by Russian President Vladimir Putin.  In January 1990, the West German foreign minister confirmed that there would not be an “expansion of NATO territory to the east” in the wake of the Soviet military withdrawal.  In my interviews with Baker and Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze in 1994, Baker acknowledged (and Shevardnadze confirmed) that he told the former foreign minister the United States would not “leapfrog” over a reunified Germany to move closer to the borders of the Soviet Union.  There are reports that Baker was willing to put this commitment in writing, but that national security adviser Brent Scowcroft convinced the president not to do so.

The sad fact is that the international calculus had nothing to do with Clinton’s decision to expand NATO.  He was concerned that his Republican opponent in1996, the late Robert Dole, was going to use the failure to expand NATO in the campaign for the presidency.  Clinton, a masterful domestic politician, moved to take the NATO issue off the table by endorsing expansion.  This played well domestically among East European communities in key states such as Michigan and Wisconsin.  George W. Bush worsened the strategic situation by recruiting former Soviet republics, the three Baltic states, for NATO and deploying a regional missile defense in Poland and Romania.

Overall, the Clinton presidency weakened the national security process by compromising the balance between the key instruments of foreign policy, ending the once central role of the Department of State.  The end to the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and the United State Information Service as well as the weakening of the Agency for International Development deemphasized the civilian agencies in the formation and conceptualization of U.S. foreign policy.  The Pentagon was the major winner in this rebalancing; similarly, the Pentagon’s control over the intelligence community was bolstered.  To paraphrase Mark Twain, when the only tool in the toolbox is a hammer, then all of our problems will look like nails.

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President Bill Clinton’s favorite freedom fighter just got indicted for mass murder, torture, kidnapping, and other crimes against humanity. In 1999, the Clinton administration launched a 78-day bombing campaign that killed up to 1500 civilians in Serbia and Kosovo in what the American media proudly portrayed as a crusade against ethnic bias. That war, like most of the pretenses of U.S. foreign policy, was always a sham.

Kosovo president Hashim Thaci was charged with ten counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity by an international tribunal in The Hague in the Netherlands charged Thaci and nine other men with a “war crimes, including murder, enforced disappearance of persons, persecution, and torture.” Thaci and the other charged suspects were accused of being “criminally responsible for nearly 100 murders” and the indictment involved “hundreds of known victims of Kosovo Albanian, Serb, Roma, and other ethnicities and include political opponents.” But the American media’s ludicrous bias and/or incompetence on that war continues. The New York Times responded to Thaci’s indictment with a tweet declaring that “Serbia’s leader was indicted for war crimes.”

Hashim Thaci’s tawdry career illustrates how anti-terrorism is a flag of convenience for Washington policymakers. Prior to becoming Kosovo’s president, Thaci was the head of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), fighting to force Serbs out of the Kosovo. In 1999, the Clinton administration designated the KLA s “freedom fighters” despite their horrific past and gave them massive aid. The previous year, the State Department condemned “terrorist action by the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army.” The KLA was heavily involved in drug trafficking and had close to ties to Osama bin Laden.

But arming the KLA and bombing Serbia helped Clinton portray himself as a crusader against injustice and shift public attention after his impeachment trial. Clinton was aided by many shameless members of Congress anxious to sanctify U.S. killing. Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CN) whooped that the United States and the KLA “stand for the same values and principles. Fighting for the KLA is fighting for human rights and American values.” And since Clinton administration officials publicly compared Serb leader Slobodan Milošević to Hitler, every decent person was obliged to applaud the bombing campaign. (Alexander Cockburn was one of the few journalists who condemned the unjust war at the time; this 1999 Los Angeles Times column set the gold standard for calling out Clinton’s BS on Serbia.)

Both the Serbs and ethnic Albanians committed atrocities in the bitter strife in Kosovo. But to sanctify its bombing campaign, the Clinton administration waved a magic wand and made the KLA’s atrocities disappear. British professor Philip Hammond noted that the 78-day bombing campaign “was not a purely military operation: NATO also destroyed what it called ‘dual-use’ targets, such as factories, city bridges, and even the main television building in downtown Belgrade, in an attempt to terrorize the country into surrender.” NATO repeatedly dropped cluster bombs into marketplaces, hospitals, and other civilian areas. Cluster bombs are anti-personnel devices designed to be scattered across enemy troop formations. NATO dropped more than 1,300 cluster bombs on Serbia and Kosovo and each bomb contained 208 separate bomblets that floated to earth by parachute. Bomb experts estimated that more than 10,000 unexploded bomblets were scattered around the landscape when the bombing ended and maimed children long after the ceasefire.

In the final days of the bombing campaign, the Washington Post reported that “some presidential aides and friends are describing Kosovo in Churchillian tones, as Clinton’s ‘finest hour.’” The Post also reported that according to one Clinton friend “what Clinton believes were the unambiguously moral motives for NATO’s intervention represented a chance to soothe regrets harbored in Clinton’s own conscience…. The friend said Clinton has at times lamented that the generation before him was able to serve in a war with a plainly noble purpose, and he feels ‘almost cheated’ that ‘when it was his turn he didn’t have the chance to be part of a moral cause.’” By Clinton’s standard, slaughtering Serbs was “close enough for government work” to a “moral cause.”

Shortly after the end of the 1999 bombing campaign, Clinton enunciated what his aides labeled the Clinton doctrine: “Whether within or beyond the borders of a country, if the world community has the power to stop it, we ought to stop genocide and ethnic cleansing.” In reality, the Clinton doctrine was that presidents are entitled to commence bombing foreign lands based on any brazen lie that the American media will regurgitate. In reality, the lesson from bombing Serbia is that American politicians merely need to publicly recite the word “genocide” to get a license to kill.

After the bombing ended, Clinton assured the Serbian people that the United States and NATO agreed to be peacekeepers only “with the understanding that they would protect Serbs as well as ethnic Albanians and that they would leave when peace took hold.” In the subsequent months and years, American and NATO forces stood by as the KLA resumed its ethnic cleansing, slaughtering Serb civilians, bombing Serbian churches and oppressing any non-Muslims. Almost a quarter-million Serbs, Gypsies, Jews, and other minorities fled Kosovo after Mr. Clinton promised to protect them. By 2003, almost 70 percent of the Serbs living in Kosovo in 1999 had fled, and Kosovo was 95 percent ethnic Albanian.

But Thaci remained useful for U.S. policymakers. Even though he was widely condemned for oppression and corruption after taking power in Kosovo, Vice President Joe Biden hailed Thaci in 2010 as the “George Washington of Kosovo.” A few months later, a Council of Europe report accused Thaci and KLA operatives of human organ trafficking. The Guardian noted that the report alleged that Thaci’s inner circle “took captives across the border into Albania after the war, where a number of Serbs are said to have been murdered for their kidneys, which were sold on the black market.” The report stated that when “transplant surgeons” were “ready to operate, the [Serbian] captives were brought out of the ‘safe house’ individually, summarily executed by a KLA gunman, and their corpses transported swiftly to the operating clinic.”

Despite the body trafficking charge, Thaci was a star attendee at the annual Global Initiative conference by the Clinton Foundation in 2011, 2012, and 2013, where he posed for photos with Bill Clinton. Maybe that was a perk from the $50,000 a month lobbying contract that Thaci’s regime signed with The Podesta Group, co-managed by future Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta, as the Daily Caller reported.

Clinton remains a hero in Kosovo where a statue of him was erected in the capital, Pristina. The Guardian newspaper noted that the statue showed Clinton “with a left hand raised, a typical gesture of a leader greeting the masses. In his right hand he is holding documents engraved with the date when NATO started the bombardment of Serbia, 24 March 1999.” It would have been a more accurate representation to depict Clinton standing on a pile of corpses of the women, children, and others killed in the U.S. bombing campaign.

In 2019, Bill Clinton and his fanatically pro-bombing former Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, visited Pristina, where they were “treated like rock stars” as they posed for photos with Thaci. Clinton declared, “I love this country and it will always be one of the greatest honors of my life to have stood with you against ethnic cleansing (by Serbian forces) and for freedom.” Thaci awarded Clinton and Albright medals of freedom “for the liberty he brought to us and the peace to entire region.” Albright has reinvented herself as a visionary warning against fascism in the Trump era. Actually, the only honorific that Albright deserves is “Butcher of Belgrade.”

Clinton’s war on Serbia was a Pandora’s box from which the world still suffers. Because politicians and most of the media portrayed the war against Serbia as a moral triumph, it was easier for the Bush administration to justify attacking Iraq, for the Obama administration to bomb Libya, and for the Trump administration to repeatedly bomb Syria. All of those interventions sowed chaos that continues cursing the purported beneficiaries.

Bill Clinton’s 1999 bombing of Serbia was as big a fraud as George W. Bush’s conning this nation into attacking Iraq. The fact that Clinton and other top U.S. government officials continued to glorify Hashim Thaci despite accusations of mass murder, torture, and body trafficking is another reminder of the venality of much of America’s political elite. Will Americans again be gullible the next time that Washington policymakers and their media allies concoct bullshit pretexts to blow the hell out of some hapless foreign land?

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Michael Bloomberg, despite being a massive media player, ran a shockingly boring campaign for the Democratic ticket and now it would seem that the workers who made the cogs in his dismal attempt turn are getting together to file a class-action lawsuit against him. Apparently Bloomberg made the common pledge to support his workers all the way till the end of a “best case scenario” campaign throughout 2020. Essentially win, lose or draw everyone would get paid till the end of the election cycle.

This did not happen, and the former mayor of New York City cut funding for his people the day he cut his campaign short. Impressively Bloomberg was able to spin this defeat as a victory for the greater good of destroying Trump. In his concession speech he said…

“I’ve always believed that defeating Donald Trump starts with uniting behind the candidate with the best shot to do it. After yesterday’s vote, it is clear that candidate is my friend and a great American, Joe Biden,”

Selling the complete and total failure of a campaign from a media billionaire with real political experience as a triumphant step to defeating the great evil of Trump takes a lot of nerve. It also took a lot of nerve for Bloomberg to refuse to pay any health benefits to his campaign workers as a Democrat.

Bloomberg preaches from on high while not paying those at the bottom.

But this betrayal is actually by far not the first time candidates have put the screws to their own campaign workers. Bernie Sanders was unable to pay workers the cherished $15 per hour wage that he feels is almost a human right and has publically spoken for man times. Young volunteers were expecting Sanders-style Socialism but got treated to a big plate full of pragmatic Capitalism instead. Sanders may have officially been offering $15/hour for a 40 hour per work week schedule, but in reality many of this workers were putting in 60 hours a week with no hope of getting any overtime for it. Workers’ rights including things like paid overtime are issues at the core of Sanders’ message, sadly when push comes to shove he is unwilling to make his words match his deeds.

Hillary Clinton during the previous campaign cycle at least had the decency to pay her troops while she may have laundered $84 in illegal campaign contributions. Maybe Sanders should try looking for “alternative sources of funding” as well?

So what’s the big deal? Running a campaign is hard, there is chaos everywhere, the candidates are running all over the country, accidents and missteps are bound to happen right?

Running a presidential campaign is indeed a massive challenge that demands serious organizational skills, but compared to being the President of the United States it’s a walk in the park. Many of the very few people whom we can actually move towards a presidential run are too incompetent or corrupt to even run their campaigns properly.

Bloomberg was too cheap, bitter, distracted to bother fulfilling his promises to his staff that he could easily just write a check for. He could have left the campaign leaving goog feelings and a good reputation but that could have cost a small percent of his yearly earnings so why bother?

Sanders managed to prove his anti-Socialist skeptics right by failing to put into practice even on a miniature scale the policies he wants for all American businesses across a massive nation.

And Clinton, well she does a great job of teaching us how much money you can make even as a destined loser.

There may be a tiny handful of people hiding somewhere across the American landscape who are capable of running a competent campaign and then ascending to the Oval Office. They may be out there but the options we are given to vote for in primaries are just pathetic. When people used to tell children “America’s great anyone can be President” that used to have a positive connotation. Now it seems like anyone no matter how dim their campaign is run could get the nomination given the right connections, cash, and the right look/message.

If someone is completely unable to run a campaign effectively they have no business being President of the United States of America.

The tale of cowardice and cover-up goes something like this: ABC anchor Amy Robach did an interview in 2015 with Virginia Roberts Giuffre, one of Epstein’s victims. Giuffre revealed that she had been forced by Epstein and his procurer Ghislaine Maxwell to have sex with numerous men, including Prince Andrew, Britain’s Duke of York. She claimed that she had had sex with the prince three times while underage. She also apparently provided photos and other documentary evidence to back up her story. The piece was set to run on ABC News but the network’s editors and senior management intervened at the last minute to stop it.

That would have ended the tale but for the fact that Robach complained to a colleague about the killing of her interview, apparently shortly after the Epstein story became nationwide news earlier this year. She did so in front a live microphone and video camera, which recorded her as she vented. A clearly frustrated Robach said “I’ve had this story for three years. I’ve had this interview with Virginia [Giuffre]. We would not put it on the air. First of all, I was told, ‘who’s Jeffrey Epstein? No one knows who that is. This is a stupid story.’ Then the Palace found out that we had her whole allegations about Prince Andrew and threatened us a million different ways.”

That recording recently surfaced at alternative media site Project Veritas, apparently having been provided by a former ABC employee. Robach’s claim that her story had been suppressed due to pressure coming from Britain’s Royal Family was emphasized in the subsequent media coverage of the recording. For what it’s worth, Prince Andrew has denied having “any form of sexual contact or relationship” with Giuffre and ABC News has said that there is “zero truth” to the claim. Buckingham Palace has responded by avoiding a response, stating that “this is a matter for ABC.”

Now it is true that the allegations about Prince Andrew would have been a huge embarrassment for Buckingham Palace, but the prince has not long been referred to in the British media as “randy Andy” for nothing, so the damage was certainly containable. And it is also apparently true that ABC News President James Goldston has something of a close relationship with Britain’s Royal Family, but somehow the story is not completely credible.

One should pay attention to the fact that Robach also said that her interview with Giuffre had included allegations regarding former US President Bill Clinton and litigious Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz. She said “I tried for three years to get it out to no avail, and now these new revelations and — I freaking had all of it. I’m so pissed right now. Like, every day I get more and more pissed, ’cause I’m just like, ‘Oh my God! It was — what we had, was unreal.’ ”

Now consider this: Robach might well believe that her story was scrubbed because of the British Royal Family, which is quite possibly what she was told by her bosses, but unless she was on the phone with a talkative butler at Buckingham Palace, how could she possibly know that that was true? The Brits are hardly so esteemed in the United States that any editor would pull a sensational story because it might be considered offensive to a Royal. If one thinks about it, it is far more likely that the story was deep sixed due to the involvement of someone dear to the hearts of every Democratic Party leaning media editor in New York City, and that would be Bill Clinton, who flew on Epstein’s Lolita Express 26 times. If there is one thing that is for sure it is that even if the House of Windsor is capable of getting back at you a million ways, you could multiply that number by ten in reckoning how lethal crossing the Clintons can be.

And there was also pressure from Dershowitz, one of Epstein’s legal advisers, who contacted ABC News in 2015 before the interview was set to be broadcast. He pressured the network to cancel the program and was able to speak to several producers and an attorney in a series of calls.

And sure enough, the cover up of the cover up started immediately after the video surfaced. Robach explained that she had been “…caught in a private moment of frustration” when the Epstein story hit the mainstream media during the summer. And she even went so far as to scold herself with what must be the line of defense being pursued by ABC Corporate’s lawyers, saying that she had been “upset that an important interview I had conducted with Virginia Roberts didn’t air because we could not obtain sufficient corroborating evidence. My comments about Prince Andrew and her allegation that she had seen Bill Clinton on Epstein’s private island were in reference to what Virginia Roberts said in that interview in 2015. I was referencing her allegation – not what ABC News had verified through our reporting. The interview itself, while I was disappointed it didn’t air, didn’t meet our standards. In the years since no one ever told me or the team to stop reporting on Jeffrey Epstein, and we have continued to aggressively pursue this important story.”

To the casual observer, Robach’s venting and her subsequent apologia sound like two different people talking and only one might be telling the truth. The reality in the national media is that some stories are just too hot to touch for political reasons, which explains why the three Clintons continue to get a pass on their own behavior and are even given platforms in the press to spew nonsense like Hillary’s recent demented attack on Tulsi Gabbard.

And then there is the Epstein story itself, which has generally speaking been made to go away. One might well ask why no one from the FBI has even questioned Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s procurer and partner in his disgusting crimes, and also likely an Israeli agent. And you can search the mainstream media in vain seeking a Fourth Estate demand for an inquiry into Epstein’s intelligence relationships. Miami federal prosecutor Alexander Acosta was told to back off the first time Epstein was arrested in Florida because there was an intelligence connection and it has now been confirmed that he worked with the Jewish state’s military intelligence as early as the 1980s. His main task was to blackmail prominent Americans on behalf of Israel. How many brain cells does it take to pursue that lead? Ask Acosta who told him that and why and then ask the same thing of whoever that turns out to be. Keep working your way up the food chain and eventually you will maybe find out the truth, or at least a version of it.

By now, anyone who pays the slightest attention to politics knows that Donald Trump told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in an Oval Office interview last week that he would “take” opposition research on his 2020 election rivals, even from a foreign source like Russia, China or (eyeroll) Norway. Trump also said that he might not notify the FBI about his receipt of such information, and that FBI Director Christopher Wray was “wrong” to suggest in a recent Senate hearing that the law requires the bureau to be alerted.

Trump’s remarks sent howls of “collusion” across the landscape of cable news and the mainstream press. Pundits asked if the president had forgotten the lessons of 2016 and the Mueller probe. Had Trump gone, in the words of New Yorker columnist Susan B. Glasser, from proclaiming “no collusion” to admitting that he was, after all was said and done, “pro-collusion?”

In a rare display of unity, leading Democrats and Republicans assailed the president for apparently opening the door to a new round of election meddling. Even Lindsey Graham—Trump’s most loyal congressional enabler—gave the president a thumbs down. Asked by reporters if he would take foreign opposition research, Graham replied: “A foreign government comes to you as a public official and offers to help your campaign giving you anything of value, whether it be money or information on your opponent, the right answer is no.”

Graham was quick to add, however, that Democrats were just as culpable for paying ex-British spy Christopher Steele to prepare his much-ballyhooed dossier on Trump’s ties to Russia. “I hope my Democrat colleagues will be equally offended,” Graham said, “by the fact that this actually did happen in 2016 where a foreign agent was paid for by a political party to gather opposition research. All those things are wrong.”

To understand the relationship between opposition research and election law, it’s necessary to go back to the Supreme Court’s 1976 decision in Buckley v. Valeo.

In Buckley, the court drew the now-familiar sharp distinction between “contributions” made to political campaigns by outsiders and “expenditures” made by political candidates and their campaign committees. The court held that Congress, in passing the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA), could lawfully restrict contributions to candidates to prevent “quid pro quo” corruption or the “appearance of corruption.” But the court also struck down important provisions of the FECA, holding that the First Amendment prohibited Congress from limiting the amount of money candidates and their committees could spend on elections from their own coffers.

The Buckley ruling would later serve as the legal basis for the court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which opened the door to unlimited “independent expenditures” by super PACs, corporations and unions.

Both Buckley and Citizens United left intact the FECA’s ban on electoral contributions by foreign persons, entities and governments. As the act stipulates, it is “unlawful” for a “foreign national, directly or indirectly, to make a contribution or donation of money or other thing of value, or to make an express or implied promise to make a contribution or donation, in connection with a Federal, State, or local election.” The act also prohibits the solicitation, acceptance or receipt of foreign contributions, as well as conspiring with foreign nationals to receive contributions.

For donations worth $25,000 or more, knowing and willful violations of the act are punishable by up to five years in prison.

The foreign-contribution ban got the Trump campaign and Donald Trump Jr. in hot water with special counsel Robert Mueller. In his report, Mueller documented scores of contacts between Russian nationals and the campaign, including the widely publicized Trump Tower meeting of June 9, 2016, that promised to provide Junior with “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. Fortunately for the Trumps, Mueller concluded the contacts were insufficient to establish a criminal conspiracy.

Mueller also declined to pursue an FECA violation against Junior or anyone from the campaign because he was uncertain that he could prove the monetary value of the promised opposition research on Clinton. Even more significantly, according to the report, Mueller was unsure he could prove Junior or his associates knowingly and willfully intended to violate the act in convening the Trump Tower meeting. Ignorance, in the end, saved the day for the campaign.

Heading into the 2020 election, the ignorance excuse will no longer be available to the president. After two years of the Mueller investigation and all the attendant media coverage, no one—not even our blathering 45th commander in chief—could plausibly claim that accepting opposition research from a foreign source is legal.

But what about Clinton and the Democrats? With all the attention on Trump, it’s easy to forget the Clinton campaign’s election law transgressions associated with paying for the Steele dossier.

As many election law experts have noted, payments for opposition research, even if conducted by foreign nationals or governments, aren’t considered campaign contributions. Rather, they are seen as campaign expenditures, which are lawful and may be not be subject to monetary ceilings, as the Buckley case long ago instructed.

Nonetheless, the FECA requires candidates and their campaigns to itemize and report each expenditure in excess of $200 to the Federal Election Commission. Campaigns are also required to report the “purpose” of each disbursement. Knowing and willful violations of campaign-finance reporting requirements are punishable just as severely as knowing receipt of illegal campaign contributions.

So, what did the Clinton team do wrong in the last election?

In October 2017, the nonpartisan Washington, D.C.-based Campaign Legal Center (CLC) filed a complaint with the FEC, charging the Democratic National Committee and Clinton’s presidential committee, Hillary for America, with failing to accurately report the money funneled to Steele. According to Reuters, Steele was paid $168,000 for creating the dossier. Yet nowhere is Steele listed in the campaign’s FEC filings.

A CLC spokesperson confirmed with me last week that its complaint against the DNC and Hillary for America remains pending, unrebutted and unresolved at the FEC.

Whatever the FEC ultimately decides, neither major party, given the past, can honestly claim the high road when it comes to opposition research and elections. The Republican National Committee reportedly has already retained a variety of intelligence firms to conduct opposition research in the run-up to 2020. It would be truly shocking if the DNC hasn’t done the same.

Opposition research may be an intrinsic and unavoidable feature of American politics, but it isn’t too much to demand that our politicians be held to account, civilly and criminally, for courting foreign influence. And while we’re at it, we should also demand that our leaders, once in office, steer clear of intruding in elections abroad—something no nation on earth has perfected more expertly than our very own.

truthdig.com

The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism, by Steve Kornacki, Ecco / HarperCollins, 496 pages

Our semi-civil civil war continues unabated. Changing demographics remain a flash point, and the country’s cultural divides are as explosive as ever. The looming midterm elections and the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court are the latest installments in our ongoing scrum. Red and blue are no longer mere colors, but the war paints of choice of America’s dueling tribes.

Into the fray jumps NBC’s Steve Kornacki and The Red and the Blue, a smart and welcome take on U.S. politics over the past two decades. Kornacki traces how we arrived at we where we at to the 1990s, with Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich playing outsized and starring roles.

The Red and the Blue treats Clinton’s 1992 win and Gingrich’s ascension to House Speakership as pivotal moments in a decade marked outwardly by peace and prosperity, but with combustible waters bubbling to the surface in the face of political strains.

In the aftermath of the Los Angeles riots, Sister Souljah, a teenage recording artist and activist, had told the Washington Post in a May 1992 interview, “If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?” Clinton adroitly seized the moment, telling her off, and came November he pocketed the electoral votes of Georgia, Louisiana, Tennessee, Arkansas, and West Virginia, states that have now become reliably Republican.

Looking in the rear view mirror, 1988 has now emerged as the last time a non-incumbent Republican actually won the popular vote. By the same measure, however, in neither of his presidential bids did Clinton ever garner a majority. America’s emerging divisions were coming into focus.

Specifically, his first time out, Clinton managed to score only 43 percent of the electorate in a three-way race that included Ross Perot. Four years later, running against a “snake-bitten” Bob Dole and Perot for a second time, Clinton still couldn’t break the 50 percent barrier.

Rather, his candidacy remained a fusion of graduate degree holders and minority voters, coupled with a significant number of working and middle class whites. Clinton remained an anathema to religious conservatives even if he frequently attended church.

Enter Newt Gingrich, an army brat, small college history professor, and conservative trend-threader. Kornacki tells Gingrich’s story too, namely how a Republican backbencher galvanized a party that had spent nearly 40 years as a permanent congressional minority into a focused force, with Gingrich at its helm until he could hold the speaker’s gavel no more.

In Kornacki’s telling, Gingrich grasped the tectonic shifts that undergirded American politics and technology early on, and embraced the politics of contrast. No longer would the congressional GOP be an enclave of well-mannered Midwestern Rotarians. Instead, the Republican Caucus would eagerly embrace the role of ideological bomb-throwers, self-styled revolutionaries in a war against liberals and the welfare state, with Rush Limbaugh providing the marching music. Fox News would come later in 1996, two years after Gingrich’s 1994 Republican Revolution.

When George H.W. Bush broke his convention vow of “no new taxes,” Gingrich refused to provide the head of his own party with political cover. When Ken Starr supplied congressional Republicans with ammunition to impeach President Clinton, Gingrich, the congressional GOP, and the Republican base eagerly drank from the poisoned chalice—even as it ended an ethically-addled Gingrich’s congressional career and to Republican defeat in the 1998 midterms, a historic rarity for the “out party” in the sixth year of a presidency. A die for the future had been cast.

The Red and the Blue also captures the other players and hot-button issues that shape the politics of our day. The author recounts Pat Buchanan’s three unsuccessful presidential bids between 1992 and 2000. In the process, Buchanan bloodied a sitting president, scored several primary victories against the hapless Dole, and helped drive Republican platforms to the right. But Buchanan’s greatest accomplishment was in sounding the very themes that Donald Trump would come to voice on his road to the presidency: restrictive immigration and trade. America First.

Kornacki also notes Trump’s prior disdain for Buchanan in the context of the 2000 presidential contest where Buchanan ran on the Reform Party line. At the time, Trump and Buchanan both contemplated running for the party’s nomination. Back then, Trump was decidedly pro-choice, and bashed Buchanan for his take on World War II. Fast forward and Trump has left much of that behind, embracing the right and counting many of the the same Buchananite paleo-conservatives as his supporters.

The NRA and the gun debate also get their due. The book recounts how the Oklahoma City bombing helped restore Clinton’s luster after losing both houses of congress in the 1994 midterms. Clinton drew a straight line between the bombers, the Right and the NRA, earning votes from Cheever Country and soccer moms in the process. While the issue did nothing for President Obama and the Democrats in the late 2000’s, after a spate of mass shootings in 2018, high-end suburbia may be looking for more controls in the aftermath.  How will this translate at the polls next month?

Fittingly, The Red and the Blue ends by circling back to Gingrich and Clinton. Kornacki correctly observes that Gingrich was “half right” when he predicted that “definition and contrast” would drive the Republicans’ future. What he didn’t count on was that it would do the same for the Democrats.

As for the Clintons, they abandoned Arkansas, never to return. Instead, “Chappaqua, a tony suburb of New York City would be their new home. Like their party they could see where their future was.” But as the 2016 election teaches us, that’s not enough for the Democrats to get to 270. There’s the whole rest of America out there.  

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The people seem totally oblivious to the moral ambivalence of the reaction, as if the wild instincts that led mobs to watch the burnings of schismatics are still alive in the civilized XXI century. In the US, dancing on a grave – no matter whose – should have been perceived as something incompatible with the values upheld by America's founding fathers. It might be natural for B. Netanyahu, the premier of a country routinely resorting to terrorist methods, to say that killing bin Laden was “a resounding victory for justice”, but real justice could only be served through arresting bin Laden and properly putting him on trial. Killing the leader of the world's largest terrorist network instead of seizing him looks like a cover-up, considering that a whole army of experts challenge the view that bin Laden was the mastermind behind the September 11 attack and that the synchronism between the operation and Obama's re-election is hardly a coincidence.

Was it really beyond the range of doable for the US and Pakistani special forces to take bin Laden, trapped in a compound with his family, alive, especially given that concern over the lives of his relatives could prompt him to surrender? The US special forces chose to kill him and whoever they encountered on the way, which may fit neatly with the American concept of humanism but still seems suspicious in the settings. Bin Laden is silenced forever, and Al Qaeda will continue to exist in its current shape, albeit with a new leader at the helm, as the US Department of State immediately predicted if not actually promised. Alive, bin Laden could tell a lot and the information could help deal to Al Qaeda a devastating blow, but obviously Washington was not interested. Fear that bin Laden's revelations would have made it clear who actually inspired, masterminded, and planned the horrifying September 11 provocation – and what subordinate roles in it were given to a bunch of Arabs – are a likely explanation why.

In any case, the problem of terrorism remains unresolved regardless of how happy the crowds in the US feel at the moment. Things will proceed as usual, and the CIA will have to find another foe of the US to take bin Laden's place, which is not an uphill task in today's world loaded with anti-Americanism.

The assassination of bin Laden will certainly overshadow the shocking story of the killing of M. Gadhafi's son and three grandsons in Libya, which highlighted the essence of the West's “democratic” mission in the post-colonial world. According to alternative reports, bin Laden was killed a week earlier by an air strike, and chances are that the information about his death was withheld to be released – as a trick to divert the public attention from what is happening in Libya – parallel to the news about the killing of Gadhafi, but Gadhafi survived the NATO air raid. Indeed, the Muslims' rage over Gadhafi's death could be diluted by the information about the death of bin Laden, a divisive figure in the Muslim world.

No doubt, the killing of bin Laden (regardless of under what circumstances he was killed and even whether he was indeed the person killed) was an intelligent way to open Obama's presidential campaign. Luckily for the candidate, the public in the country forever scarred by September 11 is sure to be impressed by the symbolic episode.